Animal People and Sexual Misconduct

As revolting as the revelations about some HSUS officials are, those
who recently resigned or were let go did at least bring farmed animals
as individuals with feelings and intelligence into mainstream focus for
the first time in HSUS history. This is not to excuse anything, but to
say that a change in HSUS leadership and workplace conduct may not mean
that the organization will now show more progressive leadership on
behalf of farmed animals and veganism. I worry it will revert to its
more traditional programs and attitudes even if the offensive office
behavior is eliminated.

As for sexual harassment of women and worse, while women rightly object
to being treated as objects whose bodies may be physically assaulted
and disrespected by men, this experience, magnified a trillion times
over, is precisely what chickens and pigs and cows and all farmed
animals, “laboratory” animals, aquatic animals,
“entertainment” animals and others endure endlessly at the
hands of our species.

If we are outraged that certain male employees in our movement have
disrespected their female colleagues physically and professionally, we
had better stand up and be counted for our nonhuman animal victims for
whom interspecies sexual assault and every form of intimate, repulsive
violence perpetrated by human beings against them and their bodies is
their experience of being alive in the flesh. Veganism is not a
superficial “food choice.” It is ethical activism on behalf
of the most profoundly, helplessly victimized beings on the planet.

Animal agriculture is now, and always has been, rooted in violating the
sex organs, mating choices, and reproductive processes of helpless
animals. Humans “breeding” animals – the very word
breeding – is an obscenity. We cannot claim to care about animals
while obscenely consuming their muscles, their nursing mother’s
milk and their eggs, or suggesting to others that these obscenities may
be practiced “humanely.”

As animal advocates, we must amplify the animals’ voices and be
their Voice: “ME TOO!”